Category Archives: Personal Brand -Preparation-

As I took an Online Marketing class with Nate Riggs. Knowing, understanding, and using social medias need hard work. Due to the fact, in Japan most social medias are relatively new. While I’m in Japan, I didn’t know what are popular social medias.

Unlike Western countries, no one social-media service is dominating the Japanese Web, and I think that may continue. Users here are using many services in parallel and switching between social-networks all the time-from Japan Times.

as they call it, has improved after the horrific earthquake and tsunami of two years ago. Since the telephone networks were not working, people turned to Twitter and Facebook to communicate. On the Twitter blog, they said that there was a 500% increase in Tweets from Japan when the earthquake hit.-Dr. Leslie Gaines-Ross

Therefore, As the beginning it was hard to figure out what I supported to do. However, with Nate’s help and advice I could get ideas what I should do little by little. Therefore, I would say, it would be nice if the early weeks’ assignments have more advice for what the students are expected to do and later weeks’ assignments have less and less advice to make them think. As this is a little bit difference than usual academic classes, ( I think this is more training sessions) it is nice to let students (including me) notice the difference step by step.

For 15 weeks I took an Online Marketing Class with Nate Riggs. The one most thing I gained from that class is the thinking process to figure our what is the company’s strategies and tactics, and how it actually leads customers.

This time I’m writing about social media marketing of reactions for Boston tragedy, so if you are not happy to see anyone write anything about that. Please Go Back from this page. (if you happen to find this page, I’m very sorry.)

They explained that the poster is made with four companies for New Balance, Nike, Puma, and Adidas to honor of Boston Tragedy.
Before I took the class, I would not care very much for one little post. But this time it made me think “how this poster could affect images of these four companies and with what media they posted this?”

Therefore, I checked Nike and Puma websites and Facebook pages but I didn’t see this poster. so several days ago I posted the questions to the Facebook group, I love Marketing （アイラブマーケティング), by telling “Did four companies really make this poster? I couldn’t find at Nike and Puma websites.” Today, I got reply; According to them “As they asked Adidas Japan, they were told four companies officially made this.“

Then, now it back to my original question “How this poster could affect images of these four companies and with what media they posted this?”While I was checking this poster is official or unofficial. I found several argument comments about “Ethic and Marketing (responsibility of a company)” I saw several positive comments and negative comments.

Not sure if they are actually trying to do communicate a positive message or just using a tragedy for marketing purposes.

Nike, Adidas, New Balance & Puma, where are you everday in Syria, Iraq, Mali, Afghanistan etc.? Not enough people in those countries who could actually buy your products?

I say companies should stay away from campaigns like this. The purposes are just too unclear and often reveal the uglier face of capitalism.-Com_Truise

I think it was done in relation to the fact that it happened during a running race. It’s in their ball park, so it’s in their best interests. These aren’t humanitarian companies, they’re shoe manufacturers; and they’ll capitalize where they can. Having said that, it is a nice sentiment.-Oscare Wafield

This is one of the most difficult questions to simply be judged as ethical or unethical. Also as Oscare Wafield mentioned, sometimes Companies may have to take actions for these cases. This made me to consider how company react these situation without being unethical or hurting anyone’s feeling.

3 steps to improve companies’ use of social media in ethical way from Augie Ray

Read and understand regulations and guide line for Marketing Ethics

Be aware that measure engagements with fun is not the only thing matters to make a brand

Always be True

I agree with his idea that gaining “LIke”, “Follow”, and “Retweet” is not the only thing Marketer should consider; they also need to consider responsibility and ethics when they make a marketing strategy.

How about you? What do you thin why these four companies make this poster? What is your opinion for their actions?

We pride ourselves on the enrichment offered through a diverse educational experience. What better way to prepare our students to go out in the world to make a difference than offering them a transformative learning experience that is more reflective of our diverse global community? Diversity in all of its forms serves to enrich the distinct educational experience of our students, faculty, and staff.

This book also explains frameworks and tips for Marketing to correlate in round for how to tell about companies and/or non-profitable organization for marketing campaign.( Like a picture below; which is from Beth’s Blog)

Top Down Influence Approaches:

This approach is about companies mainly pay to inform themselves. This way arrows companies to maintain more control.

The Groundswell:

This approach is about costumers inform about companies without payments. This way arrows companies to maintain less or no control.

Flanking Techniques:

This approach is about companies pay to inform themselves in order to make their customers to want inform about companies. ( In another words.Companies pay for marketing to make their customers existed and love enough to talk about them.)

Direct:

Directly tell about companies by using E-mail, mail, and so on.

( Again, you can check Beth’s Blog.
I really think her explanation is easy to understand even for a non-native English speaker like me.)

I think this concept is a bit hard to apply everything to make a personal brand as I usually don’t pay anyone to tell about me. However, I can still use this consents to build my personal brand.If I think my time and effort as something I pay instead of money, There are things I can apply.

Top Down:

Sending resume and Writing/ Posting on this blog, Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter
(I have control what I do with them)

Groundswell:

almost the most way people know about me
What my friends write/post online ( I don’t have any control. )

Flank:

I can’t pay my friends to encourage or stop what they write/ post about me online. but I thin I can spend my time to fix my privacy policy setting with Facebook and Twitter.

Direct:

Basally almost everything I do for my daily life; Taking with friends, posting online, sending E-mail.

At this point, to be honest I’m getting confused how I can create my personal brand as professions side. It is very hard to create my personal brand without putting my personal sides.

This concept leaves me 3 questions. Without thinking them, it is impossible and scary to start building my personal brand. so like last time, I will leave them as future assignments.

This book Tells How companies and non-profitable organization create
their Marketing Strategies to create campaign in a time of social media with keeping one united core message.
(I found One Blogger, Beth Kanter, explained about this book more.
so you can check this blog too.)

I would like to write about how I can use the concept from this book to build my personal brand.

I think I can divided my take away as two concepts.

What I want to campaign.

How I want to campaign.

This page, I only focus on “What I Want to Campaign.”

According to the book, it is very important to maintain one integrated message among all departments for marketing campaign; like a wheel. (as the picture below, which is from Beth’s Blog)

For personal brand this is important because most people (including me) has many aspects. For daily life we have several roles we should take responsible.

Also, people have backgrounds; such as something they like, interested in, hate, try, fail to do and so on. In many cases, we don’t really tell everything about them.

Therefore,

It is good a start for me to looking myself as a company and putting different parts of me into departments by following ideas of Marketing In The Round.

Advertising:

resume ( could be)

Public Relations:

Things I do for Japanese Student Association, and did for my work. ( what people tell and post online)

Corporate Communication:

I don’t have to communicate in order to built my personal brand. However, sometimes I should see and check what I write online actually reflects me. (Because it is very easy to make bigger stories than actually happened, mislead audience by choosing wrong words. )

Web/Digital:

Search Engine Optimization:

having few connection with Facebook, Linkedin
* other than my name, people can’t search with google to find me.

Content:

thing written online by myself. (Blog, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest)
This is come from Knowledge from Working Experience In sales, and Japanese Student Association, Learning as Marketing Major in Ohio University and from Books, Looking different places as traveling.

Direct Mail:

Applying job, could be posting on someone’s sites (if I leave contact ad)

Social Media:

same as Web/Digital

Search Engine Marketing:

same as Search Engine Optimization

At this point, approaching this concept for my personal brand leaves 3 questions.

How much I want to make my name easier to search online?

What do I want to express online ?

To whom I want to express online?

I should really think about these 3 questions and find the way to avoid problems might occur by doing something wrong. Since I’m not a company, if I put too much personal information, that would scare my life. Companies can move and change their names, logo, characters (if they have one), and places to start over. But I can’t do that. so I will leave them as future assignments.

When I was a freshman in Ohio Unversity, My marketing career begging.
I become a friend with who has a talent of talking. (I believe he can sell umbrellas in a desert.) He told how interesting and fantastic Marketing is to me.
At that time I was looking for a subject I can get advantage of learning in the U.S.
so I thought Marketing was the perfect subject to learn. Moreover, He told me if I like socializing and organizing events then marketing is the perfect subject to be major. s

so I chose my major as Marketing.

As my send year, I became a Publicity of Japanese Student Association and my friend became a president. At this time I could adapt the knowledge I learned from business classes so I was happyHowever, With other officers we straggled to invited our members for our events.That time my main focus became Advertising. I tried several ways, attending socialized events to announce about our events, sending E-mails, asking friends to announce to their friends. Bud we didn’t succeed very much.

So this experience made me to think about good way to announce and attract people.

My third year, I had to leave Ohio University. And I started working as sales person for advertisements( this was my first job) in Japan. My main clients were small business companies or small factories, and few quite large companies. I was working for a publisher which makes advertisement mail;. The main sales point of our service is collecting expected customer’s information. As their readers resent the mails to get product catalogs, they provide their contact information.
It was interesting for me to sell this service in that time because that is the time a lot of companies mentioned they wanted to use internet effectively but not sure how to use it. I explained them that managers in companies are usually elder people and they don’t use internet very much, so if you want to sell your products to them. Online advertisement may not be perfect way. In that time, many people agreed my point and made advertisement mails. However, some companies mentioned “as they keep their customer E-mail address, they don’t need our service. Sending E-mail is less expensive way.” I thought that is true so I asked other clients how they keep their customer information (include expected customers; interested in the products but not yet buy any). Most companies told me after they made few phone calls, they didn’t do any. so I always advised them to follow-up. However, that made me to think that the use of our advertisement. I thought if they could use their Web-site or search-engine service effectively, they could gain more customer’s information.

So My interest moved into the use of combining online advertisement and paper advertisement. (but my company wasn’t very much interested in starting online advertisement at that time, so I left.)

1. The company has quite good website(As a customer, I thought their website looks neat)
2. They send paper advertisements to announce their customers sales information.
3. That company is famous for trying something new.
4. As I worked for B2B business, I wanted to work for B2C business. ( because the last job made me realized that even for B2B business, we have to attract managers. so it might be interesting to know how retail stores attracts their customers.)

I liked seeing what they do.
Things I like About their advertisement( or Marketing )
1. To advertise, they often uses not only actors or actress but also lpinists, movie directors, and so on ( who are not well-known but have their dreams .)
( I thought it makes their image bland become more relevant for customers)

2. Even weekend the store has sales, so without flyers advertisements customers come.
3. They tried several way to provides coupons with cell phone as seeking the use of new technology. ( such as become their members, busing certain products to get the cords, or special backgrounds for cell phones.)
(This is very interesting to see how this new trying could lead the store confused. This touch me the importance of operation. )

Things I dislike
1. They change their website too often and hard to find anything.
2. The poster and Web pictures mainly uses 20-30 aged people as their models.
3. To display the clothes (The company want to sell the most), we had to change placement everyday. so if customers return the store in several days, the placement of clothes are changed very much.

because
1. The company keep telling they want to make clothes for all ages. bud my store’s main customers are mostly age 30-40. ( so many people disappointed with the image the poster and website provided.)
2. Most costumers complained the website are not customer-friendly. They often said they never be able to find anything.

They need to consider the segment age more.

3. Because of changing placement too often, customers have problems when they come back to a store to busy specific items. It takes so much time to find for them or they have to find someone to ask.

This is not something dislike or like, just I thought interesting.

Even thought the company try to make clothes for everyone, young people, age 10-20, say our clothes are for more older people, and older people 30-80 say our clothes are for younger people.

My store’s sale wasn’t very good, so I started checking sales data of my store and other stores as I was hoping to find any solution for it.
With that data, I suggested several ideas but I couldn’t figure out how it actually worked. I didn’t know how to measure effectiveness of my suggestions and even the weakness of my store. The store manager was the only teacher to help me but she was busy and didn’t know much neither.

so I decided come back to Ohio University to learn more about marketing.

I really enjoyed Marketing Research classes. but Ohio University didn’t provide any other classes which related that, so I talked with my professor of that class. I also told her my experiences in a business field. She recommended me to take MKT4900 to learn about internet marketing. She told me this class can provide knowledge of internet advertisements and that involved with numbers, so I might find interesting learning it. ( As I am not sure I want to be a marketing researcher or not, she also told me it might be good to learn about many marketing methods to expand knowledge.)